How Low Can You Go? Investigating Frame Rate Requirements for Pediatric Cardiovascular Surgery

Sammanfattning

A shortage of pediatric heart surgeons across the world limits the available surgical interventions, leading to long wait times and higher risk of mortality. The use of robotic surgery and its advantages may help address this issue, and the Collaborative Articial Intelligence Sur- gical Assistance-project is a starting point to develop an autonomous robotic surgical assistant. However, the video frame rate required for such a system to operate safely is unknown. To estimate the vi- sual requirements of the system, this study investigates how reduced frame rates affect human performance in surgical tasks. Applications with a range of frame rates were developed using Unity and a Meta Quest 3 head-mounted display. A pre-study ex- amined the effect of frame rate on performance in a fine motor task. This was followed by the main study in which surgeons and medical students performed a surgical task in different frame rates. The results indicate a clear decline in both fine motor and sur- gical performance at lower frame rates. Participants made more er- rors, required more time to complete tasks, and perceived the tasks as more difficult. A particularly pronounced drop in performance was observed at frame rates below 10 fps. However, participants also reported that the low resolution of the head-mounted display negatively affected their performance across all frame rates. The study results provide an indication of the frame rate thresh- old required for surgical robots. However, further research is needed using higher-resolution systems and more dynamic environments.